Notes for: August 6, 2013
About the Tolstoy Links
As explained in the program notes below, there are links between the next two works on this evening’s program to the controversial novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Published in 1889 and promptly censored by Russian authorities, the novella is an argument for sexual abstinence and a first-person description of jealous rage by the main character Pozdnyshev.
During the course of the story, Pozdnyshev’s wife takes a liking to a violinist, and the two perform Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata. Pozdnyshev kills his wife with a dagger, arguing that such music is powerful enough to motivate such extreme action. He is eventually acquitted of murder in light of his wife’s apparent adultery.
In the spring of 1803, a 24-year-old mulatto violin virtuoso named George Bridgetower arrived in Vienna with letters of introduction to the city’s musical elite. Within a few days, a public concert had been arranged for Bridgetower, and Beethoven had agreed to produce this sonata for their joint performance. Who was this Bridgetower, and why do we call the piece the “Kreutzer” Sonata rather than the “Bridgetower” Sonata?
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower was born in Poland in 1778, the son of a Polish or German mother and a West Indian father. In the 1780s, his father worked as a personal page to Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, Haydn’s patron, and the elder Bridgetower exploited that experience by touring his son as a child prodigy and Haydn’s pupil. The boy made his debut in Paris at the age of nine.
Two years later, the father and son went to England where young Bridgetower played for the king and queen at Windsor and in the orchestra when Haydn brought his symphonies to London in the 1790s. The Prince of Wales (later George IV) took him under his patronage, and he spent the rest of his life in England, dying there in 1860.
In 1802, Bridgetower received the prince’s permission to visit his mother in Dresden, and on the way back he stopped in Vienna. Beethoven’s patron, Prince Lichnowsky, introduced the two men; they hit it off immediately, and Beethoven offered to produce this violin sonata for their performance. However, Beethoven was late in delivering the manuscript, and the concert had to be delayed for two days. Further, the composer made that deadline only by using for the third movement music originally intended for an earlier sonata, Op. 30, No. 1.
Because of the tight time schedule, Bridgetower had little opportunity to learn his part, and, in fact, had to play the second movement from Beethoven’s manuscript since the part had not yet been copied. But he was up to the music’s technical demands, improvising a cadenza-like passage in the first movement. The new sonata, one of Beethoven’s most dramatic works, was a great success, with the audience demanding two encores of the second movement.
Then the two men had a falling out – years later Bridgetower claimed that they had quarreled over a young woman. Whatever the issue, Beethoven dedicated the sonata to the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, who had also visited Vienna. As things turned out, Kreutzer found the sonata “outrageously unintelligible” and refused to play it in public. However, the “Kreutzer” Sonata became one of Beethoven’s most famous works throughout Europe, and Tolstoy used it as the title for the novella in which the sonata’s passionate music drives a jealous husband to murder his wife, who has performed the piano part.
The year 1803 was the ‘breakthrough” year in Beethoven’s development – the sonata was immediately followed by the “Eroica” Symphony. In its length, intensity and demands on the violinist, the sonata was a radical departure from Beethoven’s eight earlier violin sonatas – in fact, from all previous violin sonatas.
We hear this evening the first movement of the sonata – the movement that Tolstoy had in mind in his novella as the music that drove Pozdnischev to his hectic state of jealousy. “After that, they went on to play the beautiful but conventional and unoriginal andante and the finale which is quite commonplace.”
Beethoven begins the movement with a dramatic introduction, in which the violin opens with unaccompanied chords using forceful double stops, and after four measures the piano adds to the tension. The introduction then erupts into the movement proper, music of irresistible nervous energy. The chorale-like second theme relaxes things a bit, but then there is a fiercely accented third theme, and the turbulence resumes, seasoned here and there with dramatic retards.